When it comes to go to market and marketing there’s lots of pieces in a toolchest that all work together. One that comes a bit later, but if used properly (much like a PR agency) can be valuable is industry analysts. And while working with a PR agency can quickly start to become clear. How to work with analysts so it is productive on both sides can take a bit longer to figure out, or at least it did for me. Even before you do start working with them there’s the question of if or when should you. Here’s hoping this primer makes it a bit faster and easier for others.

You’ve built your product and you’re now ready for your first major launch. Or you’ve been through a launch or two, but are looking to scale the process as you’re doing more launches and announcements. You really have two options: do it all on your own, or work with a PR agency. One frequent crossroad is that you’re not at the point of a full time PR person, but unsure what a PR agency can offer you; and, further what’s the best way to work with them so you’re getting the maximum value.

As I’ve talked to more startups lately, it’s become clear that effectively working with PR teams and the media is mostly learned by doing. Because there’s not much guidance out there, here’s an attempt at some basic guidelines.

Often when you’re tracking a metric for the first time you take a look at your average. For example what is your ARPU - Average Revenue Per User. In theory this tells you if you can acquire new user how much you’ll make off that user. Or maybe what’s your average life time value of a customer. Yet, many that are more familiar looking and extracting meaning from data median or a few different looks at percentiles can be much more meaningful.

I find myself having more conversations with startups – both small and large – about product management. I’ve blogged about some of the tools in my chest here but I haven’t talked much about my “blueprint” for product management, which I find myself laying out in many conversations over coffee. What follows is this process I’ve used a few times over with new teams to get product and engineering moving together, shipping in a predictable manner, and tackling bigger and more strategic projects.

Most web applications will add/remove columns over time. This is extremely common early on and even mature applications will continue modifying their schemas with new columns. An all too common pitfall when adding new columns is setting a not null constraint in Postgres.

A couple years back I started more regularly blogging, though I’ve done this off and on before, this time I kept some regularity. A common theme started to emerge with some content on Postgres about once a month because most of what was out there was much more reference oriented. A bit after that I connected with petercooper, who runs quite a few weekly email newsletters. As someone thats been interested helping give others a good reason to create content the obvious idea of Postgres Weekly emerged.

Since then we’ve now had the newsletter running for over a year, helped surface quite a bit of content, and grown to over 5,000 subscribers. First if you’re not subscribed, then go subscribe now.

And if you need some inspiration or just want to reminisce with me… here’s a look back at a few highlights over the past year:

In analyzing a business I commonly look at reports that have two lenses, one is by doing various cohort analysis. The other is that I look for Month over Month or Week over Week or some other X over X growth in terms of a percentage. This second form of looking at data is relevant when you’re in a SaaS business or essentially anythign that does recurring billing. In such a business focusing on your MRR and working on growing your MRR is how success can often be measured.

Theres no doubt that the 9.4 release of PostgreSQL will have some great improvements. However, for all of the improvements it delivering it had the promise of being perhaps the most impactful release of Postgres yet. Several of the features that would have given it my stamp of best release in at least 5 years are now already not making it and a few others are still on the border. Here’s a look at few of the things that were hoped for and not to be at least until another 18 months.

In a conversation with @alexbaldwin yesterday the topic of email came up, with each of us quickly diving into various observations, how its both awesome and a great form of communication/engagement, how most people still do it really bad. Alex has some good experience with it with hack design having over 100,000 subscribers. A tangent in an entirely unrelated meeting with @mschoening and others it was suggested instead of emailing a list to send out a ton of individual emails instead. Both of these reminded me that email is incredibly powerful, but taking advantage of its power has to be intentional.

This is not about ways to get to inbox 0 or better manage your inflow of emails. Rather its about how to get the maximum output out of emails that you send, or minimum output depending on what you prefer.